Leadership Beyond Boundaries, empowering leadership trainers and development workers in the region

Works in development and social sector are always focusing on promoting and implementing changes, whether change in personal behavior, organization, village, district, province or even at country level, for improvement of economic, social and environmental conditions. Since the core is about change, development works usually deal with engaging and motivating stakeholders, conflict management, innovating and implementing better approaches, and these happen at multiple levels.

Leadership development is about unlocking potential to have a greater impact through collective action, it aims to improve listening and understanding, motivating and energizing self and people around us, building good team and sense of ownership. Therefore, leadership programme is relevant not only for 'conventional leaders' as we know, but also in broader sense, comprising people at all levels in the development context. By building broader leadership capacity at all levels, we can expect enhancement of organizational effectiveness and success in achieving sustained impacts.

Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) launched the Leadership Beyond Boundaries (LBB) initiative precisely to serve those objectives and essentially to make leadership development more affordable and accessible.

CCL initiated LBB offering to build leadership development capacity at the grassroots through strengthening local service providers and trainers. The program shares core leadership development practices and resources with NGOs and educational institutions around the world.

APMAS has also recognized the importance of leadership development for local institutions and IFAD supported projects in the region. Therefore, with initiative and full support of IFAD Cambodia Country Programme, APMAS invited Mr. Lyndon Rego, from CCL to explore the interests and scope of the upcoming LBB programme for Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, India and Vietnam. During this scoping visit from 26-29 June 2012, Mr. Rego especially looked into the local leadership development organizations in Cambodia and specific leadership development issues in Cambodia.

From several meetings with local leadership education institutions such as VBNK and School of Future Leaders, all agrees that leadership is an essential aspect in effectiveness of development works and they are ready to participate actively in supporting IFAD Cambodia Country Programme pushing the leadership agenda for its projects and grassroot level.

Meetings with Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) also concluded that leadership development is needed to address various issues in achieving development impacts and organization developent, especially in addressing vertical and horizontal boundaries for better effectiveness. MAFF also recognizes leadership programme will be useful to enhance motivation, ownership and drive for innovation among stakeholders in the development context in Cambodia.

The concrete crucial next steps would be identification of participants of LBB programme, to be held in Phnom Penh, 17-26 September 2012, as this will ensure the success of the next follow up programme in Cambodia. For this APMAS, IFAD Cambodia Country Programme, MAFF and CCL will work together on this effort. Logistical preparation was also discussed and MAFF is committed to assist APMAS in preparation of this important event.